I recently installed openwrt to this router and I set out to test its functions, my goal is to use it as a Wi-Fi client, the wlan hardware is BCM43217 and the problems start with that it only shows 802.11G plus the tx rate is always 1mbs, the minimum, so at Try to ping that station with -49dBm of connection pings request exceed 3000ms, drivers problem, interference? any help is welcome
Broadcom has poor policies around open-source support. As a result, most of the wireless chips are unsupported for 5 GHz operation and 2.4 GHz operations is greatly restricted, compared to other chip sets.
2 Likes
Thank you for responding, I had already reviewed that page and I am very attentive there says that from kernel 3.17 it supports b / g / n. Independently of that it is possible in openwrt to set fixed static transmission speeds at 24 or 48mbs? so that this chip is very susceptible to noise 
The actual transmission speed depends on the SNR and demands of the channel. It varies with time, usually backing down to the slowest rate when not under load. In some cases, what is reported in the UI or command-line tools does not reflect the speed as which the device is operating. What does a throughput test using something like iperf (not running on the router, as it may swamp the CPU if you do) show?
That is what I find most interesting 
, in the GUI it shows SNR = 0, maybe it is a driver problem, btw I had to open the router and remove a metal case that covered the wifi ship to see the hardware inside, could it be related?
The open driver for these chips is very limited. I think you only get g mode (the table says it is an n chip, but Broadcom never published how to drive the n related registers), and no fancy features like setting or reporting speed.
1 Like
As mentioned by mk24, the b43 driver has never gained support for AMPDU and HT operations, so while it may partially work on 802.11n or 802.11ac chipsets, its maximum data rates are restricted to 54 MBit/s (802.11g) operations at best.